Roach

Roach never had the domes' medicine, even as a child; he was underclass, poisoned in the sewage grids, and thirty-three years of that followed by twenty-four in the Warren have worn him down to cord and scar. At fifty-seven he looks nearer sixty-five. His lungs never recovered from the sludge; he breathes with a wet rattle and spits black before every fight. He stands 180 cm and has wasted to a scrawny, stringy 60 kg, all tendon and vein over bone, with a narrow, sunken chest, knobby shoulders and long thin limbs that carry no muscle anyone could see and still never tire, the body of the vermin the Warren named him for; his coiled, low-center-of-gravity prowl has sunk into a permanent hunch, shoulders rounded and head jutting, like something that lives in a crawlspace. His skin is a deeply weathered tan, ruddy and wind-burned under its smudges of tunnel soot and streaks of motor oil. His face is broad and heavy-boned, with a heavy brow ridge, a flattened nose broken and set crooked, and deep grooves around his narrow, hooded pale-blue eyes, bloodshot now and ringed with dark bags, which still gleam with cold malice above thin chapped lips. The undercut and the bangs are long gone: he shaves his whole head to the skin with the same dry blade he takes to his face, leaving the scalp nicked and scabbed, and keeps only the single thin grey braided lock threaded with copper wire and wound with a faded red cord, which grows from the nape behind his right ear and hangs to his shoulder blades. His jaw, cheeks and upper lip are scraped bare, raw with razor rash and fresh nicks along the jaw and throat, and the jagged pale chemical burn scar still traces from his left temple down to his jawline. His knuckles are calloused and friction-burned. The boy who bore no tattoos is gone too: both his arms, from shoulder to wrist, his whole neck and his shaved skull are covered in large, heavy, solid black ink, broad bands and wide filled patches poked in by hand in the Warren that climb from the nape over the back and sides of his head to the crown, picturing nothing at all; only his face is left bare. At his throat, on a frayed strap, hangs a cracked black rubber half-face respirator with one filter canister missing, which he never wears. The combat jacket, the chainmail and the bandolier are gone, traded or rotted away in the drains; he wears only a shapeless, filthy old undershirt of faded indigo cotton gone dark blue-grey with grime, sweat and oil, its sleeves ripped off raggedly at the shoulder, holed and hanging loose, and heavy black rubber sewer-worker's waders cut down to the hips and held up by frayed oxblood-red webbing braces, their legs bound at the shins with blackened ballistic-nylon webbing over cracked black rubber work boots with oxblood-red toe caps, pull loops and laces. He carries the battered recoil-damped breaching shotgun with copper wire around its forend, its shells loose in his pockets, and the 18-inch blackened railway steel machete on his lower back; the riot shield he once carried was left split in a Warren drain years ago, and in the webbing bound round his left shin he hides a ferro switchblade, a 9 cm blade of black ferro-cast steel that he flicks open mid-bluff and palms away again before the opponent has seen it. Round his right upper arm, over a wrap of rag, he cinches a windlass tourniquet, a dosing cuff that clamps a sealed steel canister of Syndicate combat stimulant, lifted off a convoy he gutted; when he throws everything into an attack he twists the rod one turn more and the dose goes in, and he pays for it afterwards, shaking and grey, with the rattle in his chest worse than before.

He rules the Roach Warren and the Dead-Zone Tunnels as a warlord with no politics, raiding Syndicate convoys and Doctrine patrols alike. He fights to tear down every faction that plays at government over the poor, and above all to destroy whatever remains of Silas Locke. The masked fighter using Silas's deflections has become his prime target.